Decision Before Dawn

Decision Before Dawn (1951) is a really remarkable film. A Best Picture nominee in 1951, it's been virtually forgotten today, but its mixture of gritty authenticity and a surprisingly well-rounded portrait of wartime Germany makes a unique and powerful film.

It's December 1944, and the Allies are preparing their final invasion of Germany. Intelligent Colonel Devlin (Gary Merrill) recruits German POWs as spies, including the idealistic Happy (Oskar Werner) and the embittered Tiger (Hans Christian Blech). Lieutenant Rennick (Richard Basehart) is assigned to join the Germans, though he distrusts their loyalty. Their biggest mission is to infiltrate the German X Panzer Corps, having received word that its commander might be willing to surrender. Happy does the bulk of the work, reverting to his old rank as a medical officer and slipping behind enemy lines, but he's quickly found out, hurrying to avoid the Gestapo and Allied air raids.

The late '40s and early '50s saw a number of down-to-earth World War II films, mostly from 20th Century Fox. Occasional flag-wavers like Sands of Iwo Jima were off-set by more grim and gritty fare like They Were Expendable and Battleground that celebrated unsung heroism without glorifying war. Decision Before Dawn goes a step further than these films, making Germans the main characters without resorting to grandstanding a la The Desert Fox and The Young Lions.

Director Anatole Litvak explored similar material in his much-later The Night of the Generals, an interesting if flawed account of intrigue and shifting loyalties in the Nazi high command. He shows a deft hand with similar material here, making his German protagonists believably complex. Happy is opposed to Nazism but has qualms about fighting his countrymen, while the perfidious Tiger might well be a double agent. In a gutsy move, Litvak focuses the bulk of the story on Happy, with his American counterparts backgrounded, allowing his mostly-German cast to carry the film.

The film avoids "good German" cliches by crafting an interesting vignette of life in Nazi Germany. German soldiers make small talk marching between assignments, POWs murder a pessimistic colleague, and Happy is called upon to help a sick German officer (O.E. Hasse) even when under suspicion. Vivid supporting players like Hilde (Hildegard Knef), a cynical woman whom (it's hinted) moonlights as a prostitute, and Scholtz (Wilfrid Seyfreth), a courier who switches between chummy drinking buddy and fanatic ideologue at the drop of a hat, make strong impressions. And that's not to mention the authentic French and German locations, still not rebuilt from the war.

Decision Before Dawn is superlative as a straight thriller, too. The film is long on plot and character but it's never boring, and really picks up after the main mission begins, with a wonderful degree of agonizing suspense. The movie retains the framework of a typical spy film but remains grounded in reality: our protagonists are gathering intelligence, not destroying Wehrmacht HQ, so the usual slam-bang action is absent. Most of the action is compressed into the last half-hour, with a tense chase through a bombed-out city and the spies' mad dash across No Man's Land, both perfectly-staged set-pieces.

Oskar Werner (Fahrenheit 451) gives an exceptional performance. Hans Christian Blech (The Longest Day) steals every scene as the scarred, cynical Tiger. Hildegard Knef gets a standout role as a believably tough, embittered yet vivacious German girl. Wilfried Seyferth and O.E. Hasse also make impressions in their smaller parts. There's even Klaus Kinski (Doctor Zhivago) in a very early role. American stars Richard Basehart (Reign of Terror) and Gary Merrill (All About Eve) are relegated to secondary roles.

Decision Before Dawn is a really great film. Avoiding the pitfalls of cliche and stereotype, it's both an excellent thriller and an unusual (for Hollywood) look at Nazi Germany.

The Night of the Generals

Anatole Litvak (Confessions of a Nazi Spy) and Sam Spiegel (Lawrence of Arabia) team up for The Night of the Generals (1967), an odd, sprawling cross between a war film, a whodunnit, and an examination of morality. It doesn't quite succeed in balancing the three, but it remains an intriguing film throughout.

Warsaw, 1942. A Polish prostitute is brutally murdered, and Major Grau (Omar Sharif) of the Abwehr is determined to find the culprit. He becomes even more intrigued when a witness identifies the culprit as a German General. Grau fingers three generals - the sadistic General Tanz (Peter O'Toole), the womanizing Von Seidlitz-Gabler (Charles Gray) and the shifty Kahlenberg (Donald Sutherland) - as possible culprits, but gets reassigned to Paris before his investigation gets properly underway. Two years later, all three generals - and Grau - are in the city on the eve of the July 20th plot to kill Hitler, when another murder occurs. Evidence points towards Tanz's aide Corporal Hartmann (Tom Courtenay), but Grau realizes Tanz is responsible for the murder, and tries to arrest him amidst the chaos of the coup.

The Night of the Generals is an odd film, very hard to classify. It's too long to be a crime film, too small in scope (despite taking place across twenty years and three cities) to be an epic, too little action for a proper war film. The culprit is obvious early on, removing any real mystery; Tanz is a nutter from the word go, and the two other suspects do little to arouse our suspicions. Much of the film's 148-minute run time is padded with superfluous subplots: Hartmann's romance with a General's daughter (Joanne Pettete) is lame, Christopher Plummer has a useless cameo as Erwin Rommel, and a framing device with a French inspector (Philippe Noiret) continuing Grau's work seems flat. It seems Spiegel, hoping to repeat the success of Lawrence sans David Lean, wants to blow this film into a bona fide epic, when a more focused approach would have worked better. (This is a mistake he'd repeat with Nicholas and Alexandra, though the events depicted there at least justify the scope.)

The movie is most successful in exploring moral ambiguity, contrasting a common crime with the indiscriminate killing of war. Major Grau's single-minded quest for justice drives the plot forward; why does the killing of two prostitutes supercede the death of millions? Grau's exact motives are never made clear, but the point comes off excellently, as we see Tanz liquidating a Polish ghetto with scarcely a backwards glance from Grau. The July 20th plot is woven seamlessly into the story, piling on further ambiguities: as Rommel and others muse, history will see an assassination of Adolf Hitler as an heroic act because of the victim (see the recent Valkyrie), without taking into account the motive of his assassins - or that the act, just though it may be, is itself murder. In the insanity of war, and an inherently amoral state like Nazi Germany, such distinctions become extremely dubious, and state-ordered morality clashes with personal justice.

Litvak handles the large-scale production well. The film has lots of gorgeous location work in Paris, Warsaw and Hamburg, with well-handled (if rather restrained) set-pieces and fine art direction. Though it drags in spots, the film is never boring, a must for a two-and-a-half hour film. The well-written screenplay by Joseph Kessel and Paul Dehn (with uncredited help from Gore Vidal) is full of memorable dialogue. Maurice Jarre contributes a fine score which mixes the military and crime aspects of the film better than the story.

Peter O'Toole gives a performance that's an odd mixture of subdued and over-the-top, leaving the ham to his bulging eyes and quivering brow. His twitchy, intense performance removes any real sense of mystery, but O'Toole is always worth watching. Omar Sharif is ethnically incorrect for a German, but his performance is one-note and stiff regardless. Donald Pleasance, Charles Gray (both future Blofelds in the James Bond universe) and Harry Andrews (The Charge of the Light Brigade) are fine as assorted German brass, but Tom Courtenay (Doctor Zhivago) and Philippe Noiret (Cinema Paradiso) struggle with borderline-superfluous roles. Joanna Pettete and Coral Browne (The Ruling Class) are good in supporting parts.

For all its flaws and excesses, The Night of the Generals remains an interesting, compulsively-watchable film. Perhaps its not the great film it so clearly wants to be, but its exploration of morality in an immoral time, at least, it's successful.